[MlMt] Math Formatting Features/Options

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 11 Aug 2015, at 22:40, Marco Carmosino wrote:

> Benny, I really appreciate your working math support into MailMate. Is 
> there any way, however, to get mail to render with 
> https://www.mathjax.org instead of MathML? Or, to send email to other 
> people that would somehow embed a link to the mathjax CDN and render 
> in their gmail or whatever? I'm really murky on the details of this, 
> sorry.

Me too. I took the path of least resistance. All solutions I looked at 
were implemented using JavaScript and I needed to generate static 
HTML+CSS. That's not impossible, but it's not straightforward either.

> I'd definitely be willing to put in some work for this. The reason is, 
> mathjax produces better output than MathML rendering which tends to be 
> poorly supported by most browsers.

Well, it's not sufficient that the browser can show it. Safari handles 
MathML just fine (like MailMate), but Gmail strips the MathML part of 
the message. The same might happen for whatever HTML+CSS/SVG generated 
by MathJax.

(And in principle MathML is always better for accessibility reasons.)

> In a beautiful perfect world, I could get a "preview" window of emails 
> that are being composed, possibly just using marked, that would render 
> all my math and markdown during composition.

Not quite sure what you mean unless you just mean that the preview pane 
in MailMate is primitive (which it is).

> I realize that this is a super niche question, but if you're willing 
> to pander to mathematicians just a little but more I'd really 
> appreciate it.

I have a past with lots of LaTeX math and I'd love to pander to 
mathematicians, but it's simply too time consuming trying to figure out 
what works and does not work. The current implementation is made in a 
way that makes it possible to create alternative math bundles and I hope 
someone might have the knowledge to create something which works in 
more/most email clients.

> Anyone on-list with hints about how to get messages that mailmate 
> produces to render math nicely in Gmail running on a fairly modern 
> browser? This is what most of my collaborators use.

Maybe someone knows someone at Google with the power to disable the 
MathML filter :-)

-- 
Benny